Barricades And Guards Have Taken Over, Even In Land Of The Free

April 27, 1986|By Howard Means of the Sentinel Staff

WASHINGTON — The weather wasn't much, but even in a light rain the nation's capital is beautiful this time of year, and the shot of the White House, taken from Lafayette Park across Pennsylvania Avenue, was the perfect tourist photograph. Beds of red tulips bordered in blue ran along either side of the walk where the mother and her two young children posed. Behind them, across the street, a fountain played, surrounded by another blooming bed of red and blue.

Behind it, framing the scene in the father's viewfinder, was the beautiful north portico of the White House and, still farther beyond, the top of that grand national obelisk, the Washington Monument.

Back home, when the film is finally developed, the family will have a memento of their trip that is deeply familiar to America. About 1.5 million people visit the White House each year, millions more wander by along Pennsylvania Avenue without going in, and almost everyone has seen this view as the backdrop to an evening-news report.

Back home also, I suspect, no one will pay much attention to the thin gray line in the bottom of the photo or muse long on what it might be or mean. But the line does have meaning: It says that in the very heart of the land of the free, things are not so free anymore.

In fact, that thin gray line is only one part of a ring of concrete barricades that virtually surrounds the presidential manor, cutting the sidewalks that run beside it off from the streets. Down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue by the northwest entrance another string of concrete barricades prevents vehicles from driving directly south from Jackson Place into the White House grounds.

Along the side of the White House, the old East Executive Avenue has been torn up and closed. A sign informs passers-by that the street is being turned into ''a pedestrian way with improved sidewalks, lighting and landscaping dominating the design,'' but no one who knows what's happening believes for a minute that aesthetics have anything to do with the project.

Nor do aesthetics have anything to do with the five round concrete planters that crowd the sidewalk.

To the southwest more concrete barricades -- arranged to form large, ugly planters -- guard yet another vehicle entrance to the White House grounds.

The purpose of all this concrete work is as simple as it is obvious and necessary: to prevent dynamite-laden trucks from ramming their way into the White House and blowing its occupants to smithereens. And the concrete work, of course, is hardly adequate to the larger task of securing the presidential office and quarters.

The barricades can't stop rocket-propelled grenades -- I could launch a barrage of them from the word processor I'm sitting at, as could thousands of other drones sitting at thousands of other desks in downtown Washington. Nor are the barricades protection against air assaults from ultralight gliders, something else that terrorism experts worry over.

But the inadequacy of the concrete work shouldn't mask the tidal shift these barricades represent.

Less than five decades ago, before the start of World War II, it was commonplace for Washingtonians to drop their calling cards by the White House -- not at the front gate, where German shepherds patrol now with their keepers, but at the front door.

Even though poor people didn't do that, there was still a wonderful symbol there. The White House was a nice place where the president happened to live. If the public didn't have the run of its inner chambers, it still had the use of its front door.

Today a very different symbol shines out from the place. These are fortress times -- madmen are abroad in the world, order has broken down, and the White House is a fortress place.